Prof. Carsten P. Welsch studied physics and economics at the Universities of Frankfurt (Germany) and UC Berkeley (USA). He finished his doctoral thesis on the technical and particle optical design of compact ion storage rings in 2002.

His further career brought him to RIKEN (Japan, 1999), the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics (Germany, 2003-2004 and 2008) and to CERN (Switzerland, 2005-2007). Since October 2007 he has been leading the QUASAR group. He has also initiated the international DITANET, LA³NET and oPAC research and training networks.

He joined the University of Liverpool and the Cockcroft Institute of Accelerator Science and Technology, UK in November 2008, where he is now also one of the Associate Directors. His research lies at the interface between atomic physics and accelerator sciences with a particular focus on low energy storage rings and beam instrumentation.